These fragments show an extraordinary power of condensed expression, as well as a clear grasp on the unity of the Supreme Being, for which reason they are quoted. PART II. _THE AUGUSTAN EPOCH_ (42 B.C.-14 A.D.). CHAPTER I. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS. The Augustan Age in its strictest sense does not begin until after the battle of Actium, when Augustus, having overthrown his competitor, found himself in undisputed possession of the Roman world (31 B.C.). But as the _Eclogues_, and many of Horace's poems, were written at an earlier date, and none of these can be ranked with the Republican literature, it is best to assign the commencement of the Augustan period to the year of the battle of Philippi, when the defeat of Brutus and Cassius left the old constitution without a champion and made monarchy in the person either of Antonius or Octavius inevitable. This period of fifty-seven years, extending to the death of Augustus, comprises a long list of splendid writers, inferior to those of the Ciceronian age in vigour and boldness, but superior to all but Cicero himself in finish and artistic skill as well as in breadth of human sympathy and suggestive beauty of expression. It marks the culmination of Latin poetry, as the last epoch marks the perfection of Latin prose. But the bloom which had been so long expanding was short-lived in proportion to its sweetness; and perfect as is the art of Virgil, Horace, and Tibullus, within a few years of Horace's death both style and thought had entered on the path of irretrievable decline. The muse of Ovid, captivating and brilliant, has already lost the severe grace that stamps the highest classic verse; and the false tendencies forgiven in him from admiration for his talent, become painfully conspicuous in his younger contemporaries. Livy, too, in the domain of history, shows traces of that poetical colouring which began more and more to encroach on the style of prose; while in the work of Vitruvius, on the one hand and in that of the elder Seneca on the other, we observe two tendencies which helped to accelerate decay; the one towards an entire absence of literary finish, the other towards the substitution of rich decoration for chaste ornament.